Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

This is what happens when the human attempts to dominate, control and manipulate the natural world with hubris and pride:

New Mexico sinkhole - Earthweek: A Diary of the Planet

New Mexico City Could Become a Sinkhole — brought to you by the oil drilling industry.  Gee, we’re sorry.

Unusual early heavy snow fall is result of Chinese government seeding clouds.  Oops, we’re sorry.

Toxic Chemicals in Freshwater Fish Widespread — mercury contamination from coal-fired power plants and the infamous PCBs, which come from various industrial sources.  Poisoned your kids, your breast milk, your food?  Good golly, we’re sorry.

Antibiotic use in industrial livestock agriculture is creating lethal drug resistant superbugs.  Once a miracle of medical science, the use of these drugs to make possible inhumane caging of animals for meat production is now posing an incredible health risk, including new strains of E-coli, drug resistant TB, and once-rare staph infections.  Now this would be an easy one to stop — by making these agricultural practices illegal.  But, heck, it is a very profitable industry — so we are very, very sorry about the E-coli and all, but what can you do?

And just this reminder about what our own individual consumer choices have to do with all this (you know, like our mindboggling consumption of beef, especially fast food hamburgers):   our new plasma screen TVs, iPods, and game consoles are sucking up electricity at gargantuan levels, requiring an additional 560 coal-fired power plants — more poison in our air, soil, food, freshwater lakes and rivers, etc., more blown-up Appalachian mountains, more devastated human communities.  Goodness gracious, we’re sorry, we were just trying to give you some new things to play with, and you obviously want them.

Factory farm - photo: GoVeg.com

We posted about this previously, no doubt annoying some fans of these new toys.  But these are just the facts, the reality of our consumer culture.

It is destroying precious eco-communities and making our planet and our bodies very, very sick.

I can’t change this, can’t make it go away.  I can only help put the choices out there as clearly as possible.  We have to decide how we are going to live in this world, and whether our corporate profit margins, our desire for more comfort and wealth, our addiction to beef and hi-tech toys, are more important than our survival as a species in a rich, generous, lush, and amazing natural world.

It’s a biological and ecological question; it is a moral and ethical challenge.  And it is also a spiritual challenge, a question of values, frameworks of meaning, especially the very meaning of the human.

Wounded Earth by Mary Southard

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